On the 23rd of August, 2018, SCP-352 vanished from its containment container without any clear effort to breach containment or assistance from any known parties. Mobile Task Force Delta-4 (“Minutemen”) was initially deployed for tracking and reconnaissance, while Foundation researchers monitored various information vectors for possible leads to aid in recovery with no success in either effort. In late March of 2019, SCP-352 was considered uncontained and lost with no apparent impact upon consensus reality. While monitoring of information about its whereabouts continued, the priorities of the Foundation shifted towards other matters requiring greater attention while the loss of SCP-352 remained a minor, if irritating, footnote in its records.
Unknown to the Foundation, the same month as the breach, an LLC application for a company named Frollicles was filed in the State of Delaware by a woman named Jezi Vasorrú. The application stated that the intent of the corporation was to act as a distributor for a multi-level marketing business model offering contractors the chance to sell hair care products to friends and family. In short, a pyramid scheme designed to capitalize on the ever-growing pretense of social media networks.
The license was granted.
Years later, Junior Researcher Ariadne Cooper couldn't shake a hunch.
The connections to Slavic myth had always been obvious with 352, if incredibly on the nose (ignoring the pun). Baba Yaga had so many stories, so many faces throughout the centuries - but it had always been at its base an idea which represented the usual tropes of the witch. The predatory woman, preying on the innocents, ultimately the consequence of uncontrolled female agency and the typical misogynistic fears wrapped up in those legends. The way that 352 had been discovered and presented was every inch the classic murder monster, so why had it just up and vanished without a trace one day?
Those kinds of anomalies didn't tend to just do that, as a rule.
Cooper wasn't explicitly on the team tasked with looking for lost SCPs, but the file had passed over her desk in TactTheo due to 352's connections to the pagan myths of Eastern Europe. It wasn't ever considered by the Foundation to have been Baba Yaga, just a possible anomaly that had given rise to some of the more gruesome legends of the Witch of the Woods, particularly factoring in the way that it had favored literally eating children as its meals. Furthermore, the being had been content with meals from SCP-604, which didn't fit the motif of an actual deity accepting a sacrifice so much as beast accepting food where it could be found.
(She really hoped that suggestion about SCP-1680 had remained an ill-advised suggestion, but trying to dig down that rabbit hole had yielded nothing.)
At any rate, TactTheo had signed off on the official opinion that at most they had contained an anomalous humanoid that may have inspired some Slavic myths but 352 had not been a deity. Who needed that particular bit of paperwork completed was frankly beyond Cooper's care. She'd been the sole dissenting voice in the discussion and after you spoke out against a majority decision people tended to leave you out of further talk about the incident.
Such a paranoid group of black book researchers she worked with, truly.
But in spite of herself, Cooper couldn't help but look a little more. Trying to find more up to date lab reports from the various samples taken from 352 over the years to find anything resembling a lead, tracking down academic articles discussing Baba Yaga's depiction of fighting the 'Terrible Crocodile' on various lubki carvings in Imperial Russia (Fascinating as conjecture, but it didn't really help in the long run). It was never on the front of her desk, but like most Foundation researchers, Ariadne was a bit of a workaholic so she couldn't help picking up the hunt in her off hours, because there was an answer there to be found, she was sure of it.
If people knew of the Foundation (and of course, they didn't, that was entirely the point), Ariadne supposed they might be a little surprised to find how often its researchers went to entirely mundane academic conferences around the world to argue with other scholars on niche pieces of information. But they did, because you really didn't become a researcher without enjoying the arguing part, and it was just as important for people in the Foundation to stay current as it was for a traditional academic, arguably more so when one considered the risks of falling behind when trying to contain thousands of potentially world ending anomalies. It also helped to keep the various academic fronts and contacts they maintained for the purposes of monitoring and researching anomalies around the world.
It was mostly about the arguing though.
Cooper was in Bulgaria at the Sofijski universitet Sv. Kliment Ohridski, attending a conference on Theology that she was surprisingly eager for. There was a high emphasis on the Slavic Pagan tradition in many of the break out groups, and the keynote speaker was an expert on the unofficial folk religious practices of the region. She really couldn't give up chasing after 352, even when presenting her own paper on a completely different topic. It was like an itch she couldn't quite reach, always in her awareness.
It couldn't hurt to gather just a little more information, could it?
Ariadne checked into the Sofia Balkan Palace, a little grateful that she was able to book at such a nice hotel for a few nights. Site-89 was a great place to work at, all things considered, but it was isolated to a ridiculous degree for a non-exclusion site. Granted, it was in an active volcanic field in North Ethiopia which worked great for containment, but it wasn't like you could have an impulse lunch at a cafe off-site when the closest major city was almost five hundred kilometers away.
Unfortunately, it also put her right in the path of people attending other conferences in the hotel, and in this case those people were Boss Babes.
SCP-352, living her best life. (And you can too!)
Like most people, Cooper didn't have a ton of time for the MLM sales pitches or 'be your own boss' rhetoric. As soon as she arrived and saw the banner over the main conference room welcoming the 'Frollicles' 400' to their annual gathering, she did her best to avoid anyone with really shiny hair and a cell phone gripped in their hand as if their life depended on it. The whole MLM scheme was so scammy, preying on people's desire for stability and giving them anything but while annoying everyone nearby. But beyond that, she hadn't given them much thought, focusing instead on reading over the itinerary of her own conference as she ate her breakfast in the lobby cafe.
"Excuse me, miss?"
There was a brief moment where something insufferable surfaced in Cooper, and she almost corrected the stranger by saying actually, it's doctor, but fortunately she had grown out of that phase. Still, when she looked up at the woman across the table, it was with a touch of irritation she couldn't quite hide. She wasn't a morning person in the best of circumstances, and getting a sales pitch over her coffee wouldn't do much to improve that, but she attempted to be something like a human being and looked up with a guarded smile, trying to convey that she wasn't interested. "Can I help you with something?"
The other woman didn't seem to particularly care though, launching into what was clearly a very practiced pitch.
"I just wanted to say, you have amazing hair. It's got so much body and you clearly care for it very well! I'm wondering if —-" And just like that, the other woman stopped, her nostrils doing a very visible flare as her eyes narrowed, just a touch. Ariadne took the moment to attempt to stand up, not reading the stranger's reaction quite correctly and taking it as a window to get the hell out of there.
"I'm really not interested in whatever you're selling, if you'll excuse me —"
The other woman's eyes seemed to go wild for a moment, wide and full of a fire that was hard to describe. "You."
And just like that, Cooper went from vaguely annoyed to afraid.
There was something visceral, instinctual about this sense of danger, even though nothing about the situation had directly prompted it. Ariadne knew better than to disregard that fear though, keeping her eyes on the woman in front of her who had gone from nearly cloying to barely restrained — rage? Anger? Panic?
Cooper realized that everyone around them had frozen, and some part of her recognized that it was likely time itself. She flexed her fist on the table as a test that she had some control over her body without provoking whatever the hell was staring her down, and was relived that it seemed like she did. For now. The other woman pulled out the chair opposite Ariadne at the small table, keeping her fixed in a stare that felt like she had been pinned to the floor with it.
"So. After so long, you've found me." The woman's tone had changed to something harder and with a stronger accent, and Ariadne realized that her eyes had somehow grown older, sitting in a younger face with a truly incongruent contrast. Cooper had worked for the Foundation for a long time now, and knew the hallmarks of Type Greens, anahumans, tulpas, etc.
This was different. This was power, manifest. The kind of being that you couldn't help but understand as a god if it wanted you to because that was the kind of power it had.
"Baba Yaga," she managed to whisper, possibly because the other allowed it.
Yaga smirked slightly, as if pleased by Ariadne's quickness or perhaps some other quirk of the mind that she could only guess at. Maybe she was just glad to have found an easy breakfast or something.
"You weren't even trying to find me, were you? But you put the pieces together better than most, clever girl." Yaga reached out to drink Cooper's coffee, since clearly Ariadne wasn't in a position to stop her from it. "Well, don't worry. You won't remember this in a few minutes and can get on your merry way. You have that place's stink about you, but I've never held that against someone." And she cackled, cackled as if it was the funniest joke in the world, because maybe at that exact moment it was to her.
"Tell me, child. Tell me what you know."
Ariadne swallowed, but her urge to answer wasn't being compelled out of her. She wanted to know if she had been right, even if she wouldn't know it for long. "I don't know any of it for sure, but — monsters don't just vanish like that, so you couldn't have been just another monster. If you were — if you are Baba Yaga, then you'd have the power to leave whenever you wanted to, and you did. You stayed for some reason, until you didn't."
Yaga's lip curled. "You people fed me well for years, why would I go somewhere else? For all that your type loves to give everything names and classifications for everything, it all boils down to motivation, child. Gods, monsters, heroes — all of it is merely answering a need, responding and reacting." She waved one hand, the over the top acrylic manicure somehow looking downright feral with the action. "I exist because of fear. It allows for all kinds of power, since it is always in high supply."
Cooper had never hated being right more in her life.
"But of course, you couldn't keep feeding me forever, not as even your people came up with new and exciting ways to bring me feasts. Some of it creative, but see, the problem with that is that it was all based on loopholes. Your Class D types, terrified because they had been given no choice but to enter my lair, the human flesh made by one of the other toys you had found — it's cheap, in the end."
Ariadne frowned, just slightly. "So that — that allowed you to escape? That we weren't providing the offerings the way we were supposed to anymore?"
Yaga seemed to grow angry for a moment, then shook her head, as if disappointed in the question. "You were never holding me in the first place, just as you aren't holding half of what you think you are. I chose to stay when times were lean, but look around!" She raised her arms to the various inspirational posters and balloons around them, ready for the MLM nonsense later that day. "People are terrified right now, child! Afraid of being poor, afraid of being ugly, afraid of being tricked — afraid, afraid, afraid. This is a far more sustainable solution for my hunger than anything your type could come up with, and I haven't had to sacrifice one child yet. You'd think you'd be grateful!"
Now Cooper really hated being right, specifically about the child sacrifice. "I am — I mean, I genuinely am. It's just hard to understand, all in the abstract, I suppose. I'm human. I guess that when you put it like that — maybe I'm afraid too."
At that, Yaga's face relaxed into the sort of smile an elder saved for the youth, indulgent, even loving if with a tinge of pity. "Of course you are. You know what I can do, which is why I'm going to spare you remembering any of this. What can I say? There is some comfort knowing that Fate still has some surprises in store for me."
With a wink, the woman was gone and Cooper was left in an bustling hotel cafe, staring at a coffee cup she couldn't even remember draining and frowning slightly. She really needed to get another one to go if she wanted to be on time for the keynote at the university.
When she returned to her hotel later that night, the desk told her that a package had been left for her by Jezi Vasorrú, the woman who had run the conference at the hotel that day. Inside were some haircare products, a brightly colored makeup bag, and a note in loopy handwriting.
Treat yourself, girl! You deserve it!
Ariadne frowned at the note, wondering briefly if they'd given out to all hotel guests but according to the desk it had been left for her exclusively by the woman running the conference they'd hosted earlier in the day. Cooper couldn't help her irritated sigh, heading towards the elevators with the bag in her hand.
Try as you might it sure felt like you just couldn't outrun a girl boss.